Wild Kindness: Essays on Loving Well Part 5
Some love arrives for the sunrise. But the love that changes us? It stays for the storm. Loving through is what happens when devotion meets devastation. When it’s not easy or pretty or Instagrammable but it’s real.
It’s showing up when someone is grieving, or gutted, or lost. It’s choosing to stay close even when there’s nothing to gain. It’s saying, “I’m not afraid of this part of you.”
This kind of love doesn’t run when things get messy. It rolls up its sleeves. It cancels plans. It holds the trash bag open and says, “Let’s sort through this together.”
Loving through means you don’t need someone to be at their best to still see the best in them. And no, it’s not always romantic. Sometimes it’s a friend, a soul companion, a quiet stranger who shows up in the exact moment your world is collapsing and says, “You’re not going to do this alone.”
There was a season of my life when the place I had to return to felt like a graveyard. A former home now ruined, flooded, molded, rotting with memory.
And in that time when I couldn’t even go inside without shaking, someone came. He flew in. Not for glory, not for credit but just to stand beside me.
There were days I sat in the car, frozen.
And he ran between me and the workers, between my silence and the shattered house, offering his presence like scaffolding while I regained my ability to breathe and see clearly.
I didn’t know love could look like that.
Like dumpsters and hotel rooms and organized to-do lists. Like calm in the middle of someone else’s storm. But now I do.
And now I know that this is what love looks like when it isn’t performative.
It’s what love looks like when it’s real.
To love well isn’t just to love when it’s easy. It’s to love through. Through heartbreak. Through confusion.
Through the parts of life that feel uninhabitable. This kind of love doesn’t just get you through the hard part, it reminds you you’re still worthy in the middle of it.
And sometimes, that’s enough to bring you back to life.